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A new report highlights how nimble scammers and spammers are in the face efforts to combat robocalls.

Despite new initiatives by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and carriers, robocalls aren’t on the wane. Americans are still facing a scourge of 200 million unwanted robocalls a day, according to a report from Transaction Network Services (TNS), a major telecommunications network and services company.

And nearly 30% of all U.S. calls were negative (nuisance, scam or fraud calls) in the first six months of the year, TNS said.

One unsurprising statistic mentioned in the report. VoIP-originated calls generated over 50% of the negatively scored calls in the first half of 2019 by total volume, up from 48% last year.

But that hasn’t seemed to make much of a dent so far. Nuisance calls jumped 38% from the third quarter of last year, while high-risk calls –such as scammers targeting identity theft – were up 28%, TNS said.

And the FCC actually saw an 8% increase year-over year in consumer robocall complaints when comparing February-June 2019 to February-June 2018, as cited by TNS in the report.

There is a limit to what major U.S. carriers can do. They are only a small part of the problem, TNS said. While 70% of all calls (normal calls and unwanted calls) come from major U.S. carriers, only 12% of the high-risk calls are from the big carriers. That means the problem lies with lesser-known providers.

So in mid-February the FCC sent a proposal to extend the reach of U.S. caller ID spoofing rules to include communications originating from outside the U.S. to recipients within the United States.

Scams: younger vs older.

Credit: Transaction Network Services

Hijacking now a threat

A growing threat is robocall hijacking – when a subscriber’s number is hijacked by a bad guy – doubling over last year’s figure, TNS said.

TNS estimates that 1 in 1,700 numbers were hijacked by spoofers in 28 day-period. In the last report the frequency was only 1 in 4,000.

In one case of hijacking, a spoofer placed over 36,000 scam calls in a 3-day period according to the TNS report.

“The hijacking of real wireless numbers is rising.”

– 2019 1H Robocall Investigation Report, Transaction Network Services

Another spoofing threat cited in the report is that of legitimate toll-free numbers of leading tech companies. Here, the scammer will claim there is something wrong with the victim’s account at the company and try to get personal information.

Is there a solution?

Yes, if you can adapt the way you use your phone to the Do Not Disturb feature. On both the iPhone and Android it’s simple but very effective. You turn on Do Not Disturb in Settings and then make an exception for your contacts.

As a result, unwanted calls will not get through. And just in case one of those calls is one you actually want, you will see it as a “missed call.”

It doesn’t work exactly the same way on all phones but it does on most iPhones and Android phones from major phone suppliers and carriers.

I was a founding member of CNET news and hardware editor at CNET, a contributing technology reporter for the New York Times, and a reporter and editor at the Asian Wall

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I was a founding member of CNET news and hardware editor at CNET, a contributing technology reporter for the New York Times, and a reporter and editor at the Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly -- the latter in Japan, where I lived for ten years. Currently a contributing reporter for Fox News.